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Do you remember this?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

5,25 inch floppy disk! I worked with this a lot ...

With CP/M operating system! ;-)

Wrong!

8 inch floppy disk

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Looks like the soft sector variant. How bloody modern 8-)

LSZK, Switzerland

I do. When very young, and even more naive than today, I spent a ridiculous amount of money on an original,certified,licensed, set of CP/M 68K, though that was already on 5,25" floppies. The 68K hardware I wanted to launch into came before the advent of Linux, sadly.

8" floppy disks I used on the Apple ][ , fond memories of sleepless nights of programming drivers in 6502 assembler... The ultimate stage was double side double density, giving a whopping 1,2 MB capacity on one expensive floppy disk. Carefully cleaned, they could last for several months! Will never forget the noises these drives made: robust permanent rotation (direct drive 50Hz!), outspoken head positioning steppers, and above all the loud clack of the head load solenoids.

Today, when visiting the "data centres" which we called "server rooms" in more honest days, I only hear a constant but extremely loud and persistent noise, never sure of its repartition over servers/storage/airco. The world is going grey in every corner.

EBZH Kiewit, Belgium

Vague memories of cutting little squares out of the vinyl envelope, to trick the drive into double density mode, or double side, or whatever mode would increase capacity...

@tomjnx: soft-sectored indeed, hard sectoring had a ring of perforations close to the hub, each hole marking one sector (of 128 or so bytes..?)

EBZH Kiewit, Belgium

Correct - soft sectored, ~250k bytes. I wrote a BIOS for CPM 2.2 for two of the 8 inch floppy drives, made by Shugart. Did a lot of software development on that, in Microsoft's Macro-80 assembler.

One of the projects was a special purpose portable computer, running CPM 2.2 out of EPROMs. We built a batch of about 30 for Pfizer (the drugs company) and to make it legal we bought the same quantity of those 8" floppies in the photo and just binned them. They were about 50 quid each i.e. about the same as a retail CD of winXP is today.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I used to do 8080 code in assembly language, it was luxury when we got in-circuit emulation on our Intel MDS. That had TWO 8" floppy drives.

Darley Moor, Gamston (UK)

The notable thing is that Intel reportedly sold tens of thousands of the MDS systems for about £20k each!

The cost of entering the microprocessor development food chain was very high back then, when you adjust that 20k for 35 years of inflation. A decent Tektronix scope was £5000.

I never did any of that - I built my own "MDS", but we didn't have an emulator until the mid 1980s. It was quite handy (a real time ICE) for profiling, to see where the CPU was spending 99% of its time...

Also we started on the Z80; never did the 8080. And now, 2013, I still make a Z80 based box. It uses the Z180.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I note the intelligent things other people have done at the time these were the norm. My immediate recollection of these discs were to load up 'Leisure Suit Larry' on my Dad's company PC. Not sure is LSL is still around but I reckon these days some monitoring software would require my Dad to explain his choice of games found on company property.

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